Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  If Dad wasn't home when a June Bug unexpectedly materialized, I was to follow his specific instructions: under no circumstances should I allow her into the house. "Smile and tell her to hold on to that fabulous human quality which, unfortunately, people no longer have the slightest sense of—pride. No, there was never anything wrong with Mr. Darcy. You may also elucidate that the saying is true: it will all feel better in the morning. And if she still insists, which is likely—some of them have dispositions of pit bulls with bones—you'll have to let drop the word police. That's all you need to say, poelease, and with any luck she'll fly from the house —if my prayers are answered, from our lives—like a chaste soul out of hell."

  Now I was tiptoeing downstairs, more than a little nervous (it wasn't easy being Dad's Human Resource) and just as I reached the front door, she rang the bell. I looked through the peephole, but she'd turned to look over her shoulder at the yard. With a deep breath, I switched on the porch light and

  opened the door. "Howdy," she said. I froze. Standing in front of me was Eva Brewster, Evita Perôn. "Nice to see you," she said. "Where is he?" I couldn't speak. She grimaced, burped "ha," and pushed both the door and me to the side as she walked inside. "Gareth, honey, I'm home!" she shouted, her face upturned as if expecting Dad to materialize from the ceiling.

  I was so shocked, I could only stand and stare. "Kitty," I realized, had been a pet name, which she'd doubtlessly had at some point in her life and resurrected so they'd have a secret. I should have known—at the very least thought about it. They'd had them before. Sherry Piths had been Fuzz. Cassie Bermondsey had been both Lil' and Squirts. Zula Pierce had been Midnight Magic. Dad found it humorous when they had catchy names that tripped off the tongue, and his smile, when saying this name, she probably mistook for Love, or, if not Love, some seed of Caring, which would eventually grow into the massive vine of Affection. It might be a nickname her father gave her when she was six or her Secret Hollywood Name (the name she should have been called, the one that would have been her passport to the Paramount lot).

  "You going to speak? Where is he?" "At dinner," I said, swallowing, "with a-a colleague." "Uh-huh. Which one?" "Professor Arnie Sanderson." "Right. Sure." She made another sulky noise, crossed her arms so her jacket winced,

  and continued down the hall to the library. Dimly, I followed. She sauntered over to Dad's legal pads neatly stacked on the wooden table by the bookshelves. She grabbed one, ruffling the pages.

  "Ms. Brewster—?" "Eva." "Eva." I took few steps closer. She was approximately six inches taller

  than me and sturdy as a silo. "I-I'm sorry, but I don't know if you should be here. I have homework." She threw her head back and laughed (see "Shark Death Cry," Birds and Beasts, Barde, 1973, p. 244). "Oh, come on," she said looking at me, flinging the legal pad to the floor. "One of these days you're going to have to lighten up. Though with him, yeah, I got you —it's a tall order. I'm sure I'm not the only one he keeps in a constant state of terror." She moved past me, out of the library, down the hall toward the kitchen, affecting the air of a real estate agent inspecting the wallpaper, rugs, doorjambs and ventilation in order to determine a price the market could bear. I understood now: she was drunk. But she was a concealed drunk. She'd vigorously zipped up most of the drunkenness so it was scarcely visible, only in her eyes, which weren't red, but swollen (and a little bit sluggish when they blinked), also in her walk, which was slow and forced, as if she had to organize every step or she'd topple like a FOR SALE sign. Every now and then, too, a word jammed in her mouth and began to slide back into her throat until she said something else and it coughed out.

  "Just taking a teensy-weensy look around," she muttered, trailing her chubby, manicured hand along the kitchen counter. She pressed PLAY on the answering machine ("You have no new messages.") and squinted at June Bug Dorthea Driser's ugly cross-stitch quotations hanging in rows along the wall by the telephone ("Love Thy Neighbor," "To Thine Own Self Be True").

  "You knew about me, didn't you?" she asked. I nodded. "Because he was weird that way. All the secrets and lies. Remove one

  from the ceiling and the whole thing collapses on top of you. Nearly kills you. He lies about everything—even 'Nice to see you,' and 'Take care.' " She tilted her head, thinking. "Any idea how you get to be a man like that? What happened to him? Did his mother drop him on his head? Was he the nerd who wore an ugly brace on his leg and everyone beat him to a pulp at lunchtime—?"

  She was opening the door leading down to Dad's study. "—If you could shed some light on that it'd be great, because I, for one,

  am pretty confounded — " "Ms. Brewster—?" "—keeps me awake at night—" She was clunking down the stairs. "I-I think my dad would prefer that you wait up here." She ignored me, walking the rest of the way down. I heard her fumble

  with the switch to the overhead lights, then yank the chain of Dad's green desk lamp. I hurried after her. When I entered the study she was, as I both expected and feared, inspecting the six butterfly and moth cases. Her nose was almost touching the glass of the third case from the window and a small cloud had formed over the female Euchloron megaera, the Verdant Sphinx Moth. It wasn't her fault she was drawn to them; they were the most riveting things in the room. Not that Lepidoptera displayed in Ricker cases was a unusual thing ("Let's Make a Deal" Lupine told Dad and me they were a dime a dozen at estate sales, and could be purchased on the street in New York City for "forty big ones") but many of these specimens were exotics, rarely seen outside of a textbook. Apart from the three Cassius Blues (which looked quite dreary in comparison to the Paris Peacock just next to them—three wan orphans standing beside Rita Hayworth), my mother had purchased the others from butterfly farms in South America, Africa and Asia (all of them supposedly humane, allowing the insects a full life and natural death before collection; "You should have heard her on the phone drilling them about the living conditions," Dad said. "You'd have thought we were adopting a child."). The Cairns Birdwing

  (4.8 in.), the Madagascan Sunset Moth (3.4 in.) were so luminescent, they looked as if they weren't real, but crafted by Nicholas and Alexandra's legendary toymaker, Sacha Lurin Kuznetsov. With the most dazzling materials at his fingertips—velvet, silks, furs—he could craft chinchilla teddy bears, 24-carat dollhouses in his sleep (see Imperial Indulgence, Lipnokov, 1965).

  "What is this stuff?" asked Eva, moving to examine the fourth box, jutting out her chin.

  "Just some bugs." I was standing right behind her. Gray lint balls pimpled the sides of her white wool jacket. A strand of her sulphur orange hair swerved into a ? on her left shoulder. If we'd been in a film noir it would've been the moment I jammed a pistol into her back through the pocket of my trench coat and said, through teeth: "Make a funny move and I'll blow you from here to next Tuesday."

  "I don't like this kinda thing," she said. "Gives me the creeps."

  "How'd you meet my dad?" I asked as cheerfully as I could.

  She turned around, narrowing her eyes. They really were an incredible color: the softest blue-violet in all the world, so pure, it actually seemed cruel to make it witness this scene.

  "He didn't tell you?" she asked suspiciously.

  I nodded. "I think he did. I just can't remember."

  She stepped away from the cases and bent over Dad's desk to scrutinize

  his desk calendar (stuck in May 1998) covered with his illegible scrawl. "I'm the type of person who stays professional," she said. "A lot of the other teachers don't. Some father comes by, tells them he likes their teaching style and suddenly they're in the throes of some cheap romance. And I tell them over and over, you're meeting at lunch hours, you're driving by his house in the middle of the night—you really think it's going to turn into something cute? Then your dad comes along. He wasn't fooling anyone. The average woman, sure. But me? I knew he was a fraud. That's the funny thing, I knew, but I didn't know, you know what I mean? Because he also had such a heart. I've never been one of those romantic types
. But suddenly I thought I could save him. Only you can't save a fraud."

  With her long fingernails (painted the pink of kitten noses) she was riffling through Dad's mug of pens. She picked one out—his favorite actually, an 18-carat gold Mont Blanc, a good-bye gift from Amy Pinto, one present from a June Bug he'd actually liked. Eva turned it in her fingers, sniffing it like a cigar. She put it in her purse.

  "You can't take that," I said, horrified.

  "If you don't win Hollywood Squares, you still get a consolation prize."

  I couldn't breathe. "Maybe you'd be more comfortable in the living room," I suggested. "He'll be home" —I looked at my watch and to my panic it was only nine-thirty—"in a few minutes. I can make you some tea. I think we have some Whitman's chocolates—"

  "Tea, huh? How civilized. Tea. That's something he would say." She threw me a look. "You should watch that, you know. Because sooner or later we all turn into our parents. Poof."

  She slumped down into Dad's office chair, pulled open a drawer and started to page through the legal pads.

  "Won't know what hit .. . 'Interrelationships Between Domestic and International Politics from Greek Site-Cit-City States to the Present-Day.' " She frowned. "You get any of this crap? I had a good time with the guy, but mostly I thought what he said was a load of dung. 'Quantitative methods.' 'The role of external powers in peacekeeping processes — ' "

  "Ms. Brewster?"

  "Yeah."

  "What are your . . . plans?"

  "Making it up as I go along. Where'd you move from, anyway? He was always fuzzy about it. Fuzzy about a lot of things —"

  "I don't mean to be rude, but I think I might have to call the police."

  She threw the legal pads back in the drawer, hard, and looked at me. If her eyes had been buses I'd have been run over. If they'd been guns I'd have been shot dead. I found myself wondering—ridiculously—if she perhaps had a gun on her and perhaps she wasn't afraid to use it. "You really think that's a good idea?" she asked.

  "No' I admitted.

  She cleared her throat. "Poor Mirtha Grazeley, you know, crazy as a dog struck by lightning, but pretty organized when it comes to that Admissions Office. Poor Mirtha came back to school on Monday. Last term. Found her place, not as she'd left it but with a couple of moved chairs and messy seat cushions, a liter of eggnog gone. It also looked like someone had lost her cookies in the bathroom. Not pretty. I know it wasn't a professional job because the vandal left her shoes behind. Black. Size 9. Dolce & Gabbana. Not a lot of kids can afford the hoity-toity stuff. So I narrow it down to the big donors' kids, Atlanta types who let their kids run around in the Mercedes. I cross-reference that with the kids who went to the dance and come up with a list of suspects that, surprisingly, ain't all that long. But I have a conscience, you know. I'm not one of those people who get a kick out of wrecking some kid's future. It'd be sad. From what I hear the Whitestone girl has enough problems. Might not graduate."

  I couldn't speak for a moment. The hum of the house was audible. As a child, some of our house hums were so loud, I used to think an invisible glee club had gathered in the walls, wearing burgundy choir robes, mouths open in earnest Os, chanting all night and all day.

  "Why were you calling out my name?" I managed to ask. "At the dance — "

  She looked surprised. "You heard me?"

  I nodded.

  "I thought I saw you two running toward Loomis." She made an odd "rumph" sound and shrugged. "Just wanted to chew the fat. Talk about your dad. Kinda like we're doing now. Not that there's much to say anymore. Jig is up. I know who he is. Thinks he's God, but really, he's just a small. . ."

  I thought she was going to stop there, at the searing declaration, "He's just a small," but then she ended it, her voice soft.

  "A small little man."

  She was silent, crossing her arms, tipping back in Dad's office chair. Even though Dad himself had warned me, one should never take notice of the words that barged out of an irate person's mouth, I still hated what she said. I noticed too, it was the crudest thing to say about a person—that they were small. I was only consoled by the fact that, in truth, all humans were small when one considered them in the Grand Scheme of Things, put them side by side with Time, the Universe. Even Shakespeare was small and Van Gogh—Leonard Bernstein too.

  "Who is she?" Eva demanded suddenly. She should have been triumphant, having made all those ground-breaking assertions about Dad, but there was a discernible sprain in her voice.

  I waited for her to continue, but she didn't. "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "You don't have to tell me who she is, but I'd appreciate it."

  She was obviously referring to Dad's new girlfriend, but he didn't have one—at least, not to my knowledge. "I don't think he's seeing anyone, but I could ask him for you." "Fine" she said, nodding. "I believe you. He's good. I'd never know, never even suspect if I hadn't been friends since second grade with Alice Steady who owns the Green Orchid on Orlando. 'What's the name of the guy you're dating again?' 'Gareth.' 'Uh-huh,' she says. Guess he came in, blue Volvo, used a credit card to buy a hundred bucks' worth of flowers. Said no to Alice's offer of free delivery. And that was sneaky, see—no delivery address, no evidence, right? And I know the flowers weren't for himself because Alice said he asked for one of the little message cards. And from the look on your face, they weren't for you either. Alice's one of those romantic types, says no man buys a hundred bucks' worth of barbaresco orientals for someone he isn't madly in love with. Roses, sure. Every cheap piece of ass gets roses. But not barbaresco orientals. I'll be the first to admit I was upset—I'm not one of those people who pretends they never cared in the first place, but then he started not returning my calls, sweeping me under the rug like I'm crumbs or something. Not that I care. I'm seeing someone else now. An optometrist. Divorced. His first wife I guess was a real clinker. Gareth can do whatever he wants with himself."

  She fell silent, not out of exhaustion or reflection, but because her eyes had again snagged on the butterflies in front of her.

  "He really loves those things," she said.

  I followed her gaze to the wall. "Not really."

  "No?"

  "He barely looks at them."

  I actually saw the thought, the light bulb illuminating her head as if she were a comic book character.

  She moved quickly, but so did I. I stood in front of them and hastily said something about receiving the flowers myself ("Dad talks about you all the time!" I cried rather pathetically) but she didn't hear me.

  A garish flush bleeding into the back of her neck, she yanked open Dad's desk drawers and hurled every one of his legal pads (he organized them by university and date) into the air. They flew around the room like giant scared canaries.

  I guess she found what she was looking for—a steel ruler, which Dad used for orderly cross-comparison diagrams in his lecture notes—and to my shock, she brutally shoved me aside and tried to stab it through the glass of one of the Ricker's cases. The ruler, silver aluminum, would have no part of it however, so with an infuriated "Fuckin' A," she threw it to the floor and tried punching one of the boxes with her bare fist, and then with her elbow, and when that didn't work, she scratched the glass with her nails as if she were some lunatic scraping the silver skin off a lottery ticket.

  Still thwarted, she turned, her eyes swerving around Dad's desk until they stopped on the green lamp (a parting gift from the agreeable Dean at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville). She seized it, jerking the cord out of the wall, and raised it over her head. She used the base, solid brass, to shatter the glass of the first case.

  At this point, I ran at her again, lurching at her shoulders, also shouting, "Please!" but I was too weak and, I suppose, too stunned by it all to be effective. She pushed me again, elbowing me right in the jaw so my neck twisted to the side and I fell down.

  Glass rained everywhere, all over Dad's desk, the rug, my feet and hands, all over her, too. Tiny shards gl
ittered in her hair and stuck to her thick white tights, trembling like beads of water. She couldn't remove the cases from the wall (Dad used special screws to hang them) but she ripped through the pieces of mounting paper and tore the brown cardboard backing from the frames, ripping every butterfly and moth from their pins, squashing their wings so they became colored confetti, which, with eyes wide, her face creased like a wad of paper smoothed out, she tossed around the room, making something of a sacrament out of it like a priest gone mad with holy water.

  At one point, with a muffled growl, she actually bit into one, and resembled for a horrifying and faintly surreal moment, a massive orange tabby eating a blackbird. (In the most peculiar of instances, one is struck by the most peculiar of thoughts, and in this case, as Eva bit into the wing of the Night Butterfly, Taygetisecho, I remembered the occasion when Dad and I were driving from Louisiana to Arkansas, when it was ninety degrees and the air-conditioning was broken, and we were memorizing a Wallace Stevens poem, one of Dad's favorites, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." " 'Among twenty snowy mountains / The only thing moving / was the eye of the blackbird/ " Dad explained to the highway.)

  When she stopped, when she finally stood still, astonished herself by what she'd just done, there was the utterest of all utter silences, reserved, I imagined, for the aftermath of massacres and storms. You could probably hear the rustle of the moon if you concentrated, the earth too, its whoosh as it whirled around the sun at 18.5 miles per second. Eva then began to shiver an apology in a trembling voice that sounded as if it were being tickled. She cried a little too, a disquieting, low-pitched seeping sound.

  I can't be sure of her crying, actually; I, too, had been hauled into a state of disorientation under which I could only repeat to myself, this did not actually happen as I gazed at the surrounding debris, in particular, at the top of my right foot, my yellow sock, on which rested a brown and furry torso of some moth, the Bent-Wing Ghost Moth perhaps, slightly crooked, as if it were a bit of pipe cleaner.